


Show Don't Tell

by BlackCatula



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Dancing, Fusion, Gen, catch and release
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 09:15:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4871350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackCatula/pseuds/BlackCatula
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>***This fic takes place immediately after the episode "Catch and Release", and thus contains spoilers for it***</p><p>Steven just wants to bust out some jams, but Peridot is somehow interfering with his phone's wi-fi connection. Peridot is, as usual, not amused. She has other things on her mind...maybe she just needs someone to talk to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Show Don't Tell

"Alright, fine, I give up!" Peridot groaned with a more-exasperated-than-necessary sigh. "What exactly are you doing?"

"Hm?" Steven replied, looking up from his phone. "Oh, I'm just trying to find a good spot for wi-fi...but I guess there's just a bad connection today."

"...w-wi-fi?" Peridot sputtered, as if the word tasted like too much salt.

"You know, a wireless signal," Steven explained, tapping the refresh button for the 46th time. Peridot had been counting.

"Signal?" she asked, suspiciously. "...what kind of signal?"

"Just...y'know, wireless," he said, brushing it off with a hand wave. "I wanted to bust out the jams for a bit, but I can't seem to get any bars…".

Peridot didn't even pretend to know what he was blabbering about anymore, or why he was still making circles around the kitchen counter. Stevens were such bizarre life forms with such erratic behavioral patterns that she'd given up on trying to understand his nonsensical mannerisms. Illogical quirks were just business as usual for him.

Only a few days had passed since she'd declared herself an official prisoner of the Crystal Gems. Not by choice, of course. Not even by force, necessarily. In fact, it had more or less been Steven's fault all along. After a humiliating defeat at the hands of those three traitorous clods, the tiny one had freed her from the Bubble Dungeon and insisted she stay with them. He had even offered her a self-contained space for herself, which he continually referred to as a "bath" room. Whatever that meant…

And, having little to no other options at the time, she decided there were probably worse fates to to be sealed to than living with three traitors and a half-pint semi-organic weirdo in their ancient, decrepit Gem temple out in the distant reaches of empty space...

What a life, she griped to herself...

"Wait a second," Steven piped up, cutting off any further introspective monologue she'd been preparing to jump into. "How come the signal gets stronger the farther away I walk from you?"

"Hyeh," she replied, crossing her arms. "Because it knows better than to get involved in my personal space!"

"I think you're...interfering with it," he said, making a face at her.

She frowned. "How could I be interf--HEY! DON'T TOUCH ME!"

"Sorry," he said, pointing her finger upward before letting go. "But look, if I use your finger like an antenna, I can get four bars now!"

"Whaaa…?"

"Check it out!"

He tapped the screen, then tapped it again, then laid the phone on the counter as a thick electronic groove began playing. He began shimmying from side to side, syncing up with the music. Peridot stared first at him, then down at the phone, then back at him, mildly unnerved by the rhythm and intensity of each beat it was now emitting.

"...wh-what's it doing?" she asked, suddenly very much on guard. "Is it...charging up some kind of weapon system?"

"No weapons...just my LASER PISTOLS!" he replied, now pointing and making PEW PEW sounds with every beat.

Her eyes widened, then narrowed, then cocked funny, and her eyebrows shuffled through multiple configurations as the so-called "jam" carried on. The beat seemed grow louder between each pause, and every few measures (counted in multiples of 4) it was joined by something else, another rhythmic fragment of sound. It wasn't long after before Peridot couldn't even keep track of each noise independently anymore.

Her breathing quickened. Her heart even started pounding along with the rhythm. The sounds became overwhelming. Before long they couldn't even be counted anymore, and she couldn't tell if each one was its own separate sound or if they had merged completely into each other. It was utter CHAOS.

...it was...ORGANIZED chaos.

The tension finally popped and she fell forward against the counter, jabbing the phone with her fingers like she'd seen Steven do. The onslaught of noise abruptly cut out, replaced once again by wonderful silence.

"Hey, what happened to the jam?" Steven asked, freezing in mid-dance.

"I don't know what that was…" Peridot said in between breaths, "...but don't EVER do it again!"

"What, the jam? Well...I guess old-school techno isn't for EVERYBODY, but you gotta admit, it was still pretty--wait a sec, did you say you didn't know what that was?"

Peridot shot a perturbed glance back at him.

"Whaaaaaat, are you telling me they don't have MUSIC on the Gem Homeworld?!" he asked in utter disbelief.

"...music?" she repeated, testing out the word.

"Oh my gosh, how can you never have heard of MUSIC??" he snatched up the phone and began thumbing through album covers on the screen. "Oh man, you really gotta hear some of this stuff! I'm gonna show you all my favorites!"

"Rrraagghh! I don't have time for this!" she screamed, angrily swatting the phone out of his hands. "Why are we just sitting around here, wasting time like this?!"

"My jams!" he cried, diving for the phone.

"The Cluster could wake up any time now, and you're sitting here worrying about your...weird body-gyration rituals?!" she shouted down at him. "We don't have time for shenanigans! What is the MATTER with you and those Crystal clods?!"

"Peridot, that's rude," Steven replied sternly, crossing his arms. "You should apologize!"

"You don't get it, do you?" she hissed back at him. "You may have survived against Jasper...you even survived against me! But neither of us are ANYTHING compared to what the Cluster will do to this planet…".

"You keep mentioning that," he said, slowly lowering his hands back to his sides. "But you never did tell us...what IS the Cluster?"

She stared back at him, a sour and uncertain look pasted on her face. Her mouth tried to open, but something inside her held the words back. She had consigned herself to secrecy, after all…

"...do you mean those Gem mutants?" he asked, softer this time. "Are they part of the Cluster?"

She narrowed her eyes further. Her chin trembled slightly, as if giving him a proper answer was still a debatable option. She bit down hard. She had SWORN to tell no one! Did she intend to betray all of Homeworld, here and now? Did she intend to do make the same betrayal against Homeworld as the Crystal Gems had?

Before she even realized it, Steven was standing beside her, and placed his hand on her shoulder. "I know the Gem mutants can be hard to talk about...even Garnet was really freaked out when she saw them, and she's never afraid of anything!"

And why was he telling her all of this? Why was he sharing his team's own weaknesses like it was of no concern? Did he simply no longer consider her a threat, free to babble on and point out every crack in their own armor, under the pretense of her being incapable of using such knowledge against them?

"The Gem mutants…" he continued, staring off into the distance now. "These...forced fusions...I don't know what they are, but they always sound like they're in pain…".

She still couldn't say anything, but she almost admitted to him that he was right. Almost. But she would never cross her vow to Homeworld. She had sworn to Yellow Diamond herself!

...and yet, after all she'd been through in such a short time away, that place suddenly seemed very distant now. She almost dared to wonder if she would ever see it again. If she were to let anything slip while on this planet, would anyone back on Homeworld ever know?

"Was it your idea?" he asked, making eye contact as if to remind her that he was still talking.

Peridot only stared blankly back at him. Where were these feelings suddenly coming from? What was it about this tiny, pathetic Steven's questions that demanded she answer him? Why was she so keen on indulging his curiosity?

"...it wasn't my idea, but I did the work," she muttered, before she'd even realized she had. She quickly pursed her lips and glanced away, cheeks flushed.

"...but why?" Steven pressed. "Why would you take fallen Gem shards and...and force them back together like that?"

"I'm a scientist!" she blurted out, her voice faltering. She kept her back to him to conceal her uncontrollable facial expressions. She didn't like the way he made her open up so easily.

Steven looked down at the ground. "...sounds like some pretty weird science...".

"What do YOU know about science?" she spit back. She could almost feel her skin starting to crawl as she recounted the things she'd observed in her studies.

No! she silently screamed at herself. Stop thinking like this! Why are you letting these feelings emerge now? You spent YEARS engaged in this line of science, and you never needed a single shred of regret, or empathy, or terror...so why are you letting them into your head now?

...maybe THIS is the power that makes the Steven such a valuable asset to the Crystal Gems?

"Well...I know that's not how fusion is supposed to work," Steven finally said.

"...what?"

"Fusion," he explained, using hand motions even though her back was still turned. "You can't just take a piece of someone and a piece of someone else and squish 'em together to make someone new like that. Fusion isn't just about smashing things together."

"That's exactly what fusion is!" she groaned, finally flipping around to face him again. "You accelerate two nuclei directly into one another on an atomic level at a very high speed, and the resulting energy binds the two nuclei together to form a NEW nucleus in the process and--"

"Peridot…" Steven interrupted, again putting a hand on her shoulder. "That's not fusion at all."

He paused for a moment, thinking back to something Pearl had tried to explain once. "...okay, maybe that's kinda SCIENTIFICALLY what fusion is, but there's a lot more to it than that!"

"And I suppose you're the leading expert on fusion, aren't you?"

"Well, maybe not an expert, but I DID just so happen to fuse with my best friend Connie," he replied with a proud smile.

Peridot snorted. He was probably lying, there was no way an organic like him could ever successfully fuse...er, was there? How much did she really know about humans...?

"Fusion is like…" he continued, struggling to come up with a metaphor, "...when two people learn how to dance together. They learn to match up to each other's own unique steps, hitting the beats at just the right time, and then they turn into light beams to phase shift into each other and become an all-new giant mashup experience extravaganza!"

His exuberant description was met with stone-cold silence and a perplexed expression. He was making it harder to describe than it needed to be, but he DID seem to understand the concept of fusion...how could he, though? How could a human understand fusion? Was Steven even a human at all, or was a Steven some entirely different thing that just LOOKED like one?

"...Peridot?" he said, waving his hand in front of her face.

"...why are we even having this conversation?" she replied sharply as she came back to life.

"I was trying to tell you about how great fusion...REAL fusion...is," he said, scratching the back of his head. "But I guess it's harder to explain than I thought…".

"It's NOT hard to explain..." she shot back, but in a rather empty tone.

"Well…".

There was a collective sigh between the two of them as whatever epiphany they'd been building up to now seemed to flicker out and fade away. No matter which words she tried to conjure up in her head, they didn't feel like the right ones to use. Sometimes words were just like that. They could describe innumerable things, feelings, or faces, but there eventually came a point where even words would fail their own purpose.

For some things in life, there simply ARE no words...

"...dance with me, Peridot."

She shook herself back into the moment. "...what?"

He stood up, placed his phone on the table, and opened up the music player app. "Dance! I'll show you!"

The phone started playing an electronic beat.

"No, No, NO, not THIS again!" she wailed, covering her eyes.

"Aww, c'mon Peridot!" He offered her his hand, already bobbing to the rhythm. "Maybe I can't EXPLAIN how fusion works, but I bet I could SHOW you!"

She peeled her fingers apart just enough so that she could see the spectacle. She watched him bounce and wiggle across the floor, leaving no bodily extremity unmoved. His movements all synchronized perfectly to the count of the beat. The mere concept of it all, flapping multiple limbs around in syncopation with an audio signal, all of it was absolute nonsense...yet something compelled her to keep watching.

"Come oooooon, give it a try," he beckoned, walking in place and pumping his arms.

No, she said to herself, knotting up. No! I'm not going to do...that! I'd be no better than any of these clods if I let myself be seen that way!

Why is this happening to me? What did I do wrong to deserve this fate? I followed all the rules! I did all of the work requested of me, and all I have to show for it now is getting left behind and stranded on this miserable chunk of rock out in the middle of nowhere! Haven't I suffered enough by now?!

It took a moment for her to realize that she was still watching Steven make a fool of himself in his "dance". And it took another moment to realize that she could feel the pulse of the phone's beat vibrating inside her head...she had to consciously resist the urge to pulse alongside it.

"Hey, there you go!" Steven said, pointing to her foot, which had already defied her intentions and begun tapping in rhythm by itself.

She made a noise like "Huwhaa?!" and tried to seize her foot, to stop it, and quickly ended up in a twisted heap on the floor.

It was about this time that Peridot realized all at once just what her life had become. In a mere matter of weeks, she had become stranded on a very distant planet with no Homeworld warp, surrounded by archaic technology both Human and Gem, stripped of the limb enhancements she'd grown to depend on, abandoned by her escort and bodyguard, with no ability to contact her high commander, on a world quickly approaching its own demise.

And all she could do now was laugh.

She was completely cut off from her old life, an orphan of her own kind, trapped on a doomed planet with a weird little halfling who wanted to dance with her. The most unlikely and impossible outcome, the one future she never would have imagined was now what remained of her new life. It was all so absurd that all she could do was reign in her hysterics and give in to the madness. She pulled herself up on her knees, wiped away a tear, and looked up at Steven. He stood waiting, a friendly hand opened wide in greeting.

...well, what more did she have to lose, anyway?

With a huge grin on his face, Steven pulled her up to his dance floor and taught her everything he knew. He showed her how to step, how to shimmy, how to swivel her hips and swing her arms and rock her head. He told her how to ignore counting the beats and how to let her muscles do the counting on their own.

And as she relinquished more and more control over herself, she found her body moving automatically to the "music", her feet stepping in rhythm exactly as they needed to. She instead turned her focus on Steven now, matching up with his movements. The dance floor began burning with an eerie, warm glow. Steven took her hand, spun her around in a circle, and then stepped right into her.

The light was blinding.

The feeling was electric.

And when the brightness finally dimmed, and eyes finally opened, it was like waking up for the first time in a whole new experience.

And somewhere deep down inside, Peridot could finally see.

And now, she could finally understand, too.


End file.
